Madam,

The idea that an AM who resigns should not be replaced by someone who wins the by-election that follows, is preposterous.

Here, a Plaid AM who has resigned from the Senedd is to be replaced with one of their own. The voting system in the mid and west Wales area is not a particularly good one. However, it certainly is good enough to allow a by-election in these circumstances.

The seat to be contested is a so-called top-up seat. The by-election could simply be open to political parties who stood in the 2016 election, except in Dwyfor Meirionnydd, which, because of Lord Elis-Thomas’s antics, is a special case. (A new party or individual could also be eligible to stand if the returning officer in enough of the component constituencies was presented with the endorsement of that party by the usual number of electors from each constituency for individual seats, ie 10.)

Each party’s total vote in the by-election is then divided by one more than the number of seats it presently holds, in the spirit of the D’Hondt method used across Wales.

These divisors for the main parties are, then, four for Labour and the Tories, and three Plaid (since there are now only two Plaid seats in Mid and West Wales); for the Lib Dems and UKIP, two; and for all other parties one, with an adjustment to those divisors in the light of the simultaneously held Dwyfor Meirionnydd by-election - see below.

The party with the highest quotient so arrived at, gets the top-up seat.

It really is disgraceful and anti-democratic that the wholly chaotic Plaid Cymru should have the say as to who the new AM should be, rather than a proper election be held. The cheek of Plaid is particularly irksome because their claim to the seat is on the basis of their 2016 vote, a part of which, the vote here in Dwyfor Meirionnydd, the AM so elected, Lord Elis-Thomas, has dismissed as irrelevant by deciding to leave Plaid and become a self-styled Independent. He should, of course, have resigned his seat. It is surely clear that, in the by-election the 12th Mid and West Wales seat, ie the Dwyfor Meirionnydd constituency seat, should be decided by a constituency based by-election for Elis-Thomas’s seat

Democracy is about the people voting, not about bureaucratic parties like Plaid imposing AMs on us.

Let there be a by-election so that voters, as they always do in by-elections, can express their current views.

Yours etc,

Ian MacIntyre, Shelbourne Court, Barmouth.

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